Unit 5 Section Ⅰ Reading and Thinking（教参Word）- 2022-2023学年高二新教材英语选择性必修第三册【勤径学升·同步练测】（人教版）

UNIT 5　POEMS [对应学生用书第95页] Although shi is a general term for “poem”, it describes especially a type of regulated poem that was very popular during the Tang Dynasty and has been in use until today.Besides the songs and hymns in The Book of Songs, the earliest kind of shi is the gushi(古诗) type during the Han Dynasty.This type was probably influenced by Inner Asian types of music and poetry with a simple style in rhyming in couplets.For the “old poem”, there were no rules regarding the placement of tones throughout the verse—except requirements of euphony.It was an easy and natural lyric medium in use during the Han and Jin dynasties. The Tang Dynasty aristocracy scholars developed a new type of poem called lüshi (律诗).Seen from the outer shape, the gushi and lüshi are identical.Both have five-or seven-syllable verses, composed to quatrain stanzas.Like older poems too, the first two verses describe a natural scene, while the others describe the poet’s sentiments or feelings. Additionally, couplets are underlying some rules of contrast or parallelism in the words used, e.g.the first verse using words describing height, must be alternated by the second verse describing a scene of flat land or so.Knowledge of the lüshi form was a prerequisite both for the imperial examinations and for membership in the upper-class society.Anyone with an education was expected to compose regulated verse on virtually every social occasion. A short type of lüshi is the jueju (绝句), a type less subject to the rules of verbal parallelism.The jueju is particularly suited to express a fleeting mood or capturing the essence of a certain scene and was very popular during the second half of Tang.It can be compared to the short Japanese lyric style of tanka (短歌). The Three Hundred Tang Poems (《唐诗三百首》) were compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu (孙洙) and published in 1764.Sun’s intention was to select poems that serve to cultivate the character of the reader.Today, there exist some new compositions of